“He will not show partiality to the poor;
but he will listen to the prayer of one who is wronged.
He will not ignore the supplication of the orphan,
or the widow when she pours out her complaint.”
When?
That’s a question I hear
from those outside the faith.
Or in another way,
how can you say death has been defeated
when people die every day?
And those are fair questions
when we look around us
and only look around us.
That feels especially fair as a question
as someone with immense privilege
who would like Jesus to come back now
and fix it all quickly.
The authors of the Biblical texts
from Sirach to Paul to Luke
didn’t only look at their surroundings.
This was true for most of the earliest followers of Jesus
and even later followers of Jesus
after empire and power
had corrupted the message
of an itinerant rabbi
with no place to lay his head.
We’re not yet to my favorite season of the year
four-week or seven-week Advent
but for the Church here and now,
the church that has not joined the closer presence of God
it’s always Advent.
God is always on the move,
and God is always working
to make all things well.
In his book How Rights Went Wrong
Prof. Jamal Greene argues
that those of us who lived through or after
the heavy lifting of the Warren Court
have forgotten how long change takes.
We had good courts doing good work
and realized it was a lot easier
to trust the courts to do the right thing.
It can be time consuming as appeals work their ways up,
but it doesn’t take the same kind of work —
messy, conflicted, dealing-with-people,
boring committee meetings —
that organizing does.
I saw a post on Bluesky this week
from someone who’d taught an undergraduate course
on community organizing.
At the end of the semester one of the students said to her
“I didn’t realize how much work is.
I thought change just happened.”
In the cursory, survey-level versions of history
that most of us have in our educations
we don’t get exposed to how much work and planning
went into the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
Rosa Parks wasn’t just tired.
A theme of Let This Radicalize You
is that you gotta have hope
and that the goal is worth the work
even if you never see the goal
in your lifetime.
The goal is worth the work,
even as you live
through setbacks and ups and downs.
Even if you or we don’t directly benefit
from the right outcome,
the right outcome is worth it
for those who will.
Cynically or despairingly asking
“When?”
when met with a text like
“He will not show partiality to the poor;
but he will listen to the prayer of one who is wronged.
He will not ignore the supplication of the orphan,
or the widow when she pours out her complaint,”
misses a big part of the Christian life, the life of faith,
and the life of organizing.
The Christian message of resurrection
Jesus’ defeat of death by death,
God’s love conquering humanity’s hate,
is our container for pressing on.
Throughout the Biblical narrative
the authors make clear that the goodness we have
we have from God.
Sirach’s passage today starts with
“Give to the Most High as he has given to you,
and as generously as you can afford.
For the Lord is the one who repays,
and he will repay you sevenfold.
Do not offer him a bribe, for he will not accept it
and do not rely on a dishonest sacrifice.”
Singer-songwriter Nathan Evans Fox
describes his understanding of “yallidarity”
by saying anyone can be a part of it —
but you gotta act right.
The prophets and Jesus have told us
how to act right.
In addition to that,
they’ve told us that any right-acting we do
is because we’ve looked back to God.
Jesus warns us today
about getting on high horses
and thanking God that we’re not like other people.
thanking God that we’re acting right
and doing the right things.
“All who exalt themselves will be humbled,
but all who humble themselves will be exalted.”
St. “Patrick began his autobiographical Confessio:
‘My name is Patrick.
I am a sinner,
a simple country person,
and the least of all believers.
I am looked down upon by many’.
In similar vein,
the author of the poem, Adiutor Laboratorium,
attributed to Columba,
described himself as
‘a little man, trembling and most wretched,
rowing through the infinite storm
of this age’.”
In his book Following the Celtic Way,
Ian Bradley offers this analysis of those statements:
“Underlying such statements
was not a grovelling, masochistic self-flagellation,
although it can sometimes seem like that,
but a profound and very personal conviction
of the human state of sin and alienation
and a deep and heart-felt sense
of contrition, remorse and humility
leading to a constant state of
self-examination and repentance
and throwing oneself on the mercy of God.”
Neither the tax collector nor
these Celtic saints
is engaging in a false modesty.
They know that all that they have comes from God
and it’s only by God’s goodness
that will anything get better.
Those who’ve lived much more precarious lives
know how easily the good and bad can come.
And they cling to words like from Sirach
“He will not show partiality to the poor;
but he will listen to the prayer of one who is wronged.
He will not ignore the supplication of the orphan,
or the widow when she pours out her complaint.”
Looking to God’s promises
isn’t ignoring the challenges of the world.
It’s realizing that that the goal is worth the work
even if you never see the goal
in your lifetime.
Putting our faith and trust
in Jesus’ resurrection
isn’t letting ourselves off the hook
or ignoring that 930,000 Washingtonians
could lose SNAP benefits
at the end of the month.
It’s knowing that this is not the end,
and that Jesus is making all things well.
God is already hearing the cries
of the widow, the orphan, and the poor.
When will God answer them
and vindicate their cries?
When we humble ourselves
acknowledge our dependence on God alone
and do the work —
the messy, conflicted, dealing-with-people,
boring committee meetings — work
that God has given us to do.